


Immortal

by Kahvi



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Depression, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 14:46:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14451531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahvi/pseuds/Kahvi
Summary: Thor has nothing left to lose, so he fights. But now the battle is over.





	Immortal

The wind was quiet. Everything was quiet. The earth and the trees and the soft fall of rain.

Thor sat on the thick, gnarled trunk of an uprooted tree, in the silent woods. His ears rang with the loss of sound, the lack of his own thundering heartbeat. His fingers ran along the bark, catching on slivers of skin. _Bark_. Trees did not have skin. Did he have skin? He looked down at his splayed hand, dry from blood. His nails were already healing, the split tips and frayed cuticles knitting together to form a perfect whole. The last little part of him to be healed. (Not his eye. When you remove a thing fully, wholly, it cannot be replaced.) Soon, after the rain had washed away the dust and grime, there would be no evidence he had ever been in battle.

The others had kept their distance. Lost at first in their own grief and confusion, then sensing something, or the lack thereof, in the air around him, they had left.

There were no animals.

His eye chafed. Thor pulled it out and looked at it, the optic sensors momentarily keeping their connection to his brain, long enough for him to see himself. Wet. Ragged. Alive. The eye shut down, and he caught himself, after a while, humming under his breath. An ancient song, heard long ago, from the time when men still worshiped the god he was not.

_Drøymde mik ein draum i nótt_   
_um silki ok ærlig pell,_   
_um hægindi svá djupt ok mjott,_   
_um rosemd með engan skell._

Dreams. He had not slept since the ship, since the dreamless slumber that had preserved him in the cold and dark. He would not sleep now; his body could resist with not much effort, and there was not much in him, now. No more battles. Nothing more for which to gather his strength. He leaned back. Let the rain wash his empty socket, filling it. When he relaxed, water ran down his cheek.

He remembered those days, blood and fear and crowds of people bowing before them, Odin with a hand on his shoulder, steering him gently through the earthen streets, between the low, thatched houses and the faint smell of bonfires. They had stories, those people; first spoken and then written, meticulously copied down by the librarians of Asgard into their clouds of endless texts from all the realms. Some were about him. Some were about...

The tree cracked. Thor was too heavy for it. His head fell in his hands, the eye falling, rolling away. He choked a name, a word, a calling. Never see him, never touch his hands or mind (cool fingers on his brow when Thor was exhausted, and the sight of a meadow and cool water and sweet grass), never, nothing, no sleep, no lock of hair, no hair of his own into which to braid it. Nothing. _Nothing_.

_Friðinn, ef hann finzt, er hvar_   
_ein firrest þann mennska skell,_   
_fær veggja sik um, drøma þar_   
_um silki ok ærlig pell._

In his younger days, Thor had believed it all. Thought himself, if not a god, then something so like a god it made no difference. And there were hammers forged in the heart of a sun, and there were rainbow bridges to other worlds, and the world was a disc with a cascading waterfall into nothingness; the rimfall over which majestic ships flew so elegantly, to the golden spires of the palace that had been his whole existence. But there were no eight-legged horses, no slaughtered pigs come back to life if you threw their sucked-dry bones into their skin, the Valkyries were dead and Valhalla was not an afterlife, but a home drowned in fire. There had been a Hela, but no Helheim other than her rule. Death was death, and death was all. Ragnarok had been and gone, and Thor was still here.

It grew darker, as it would; after all, the sun and its light was gone. He was too far removed, here, to hear the screams of those who desperately searched for their loved ones, finding not even ashes. At least he'd had a body over which to mourn, for all of half a second. The nothing would not come for Thor; it would have come already. He let out a breath he had been holding he knew not how long. Took another. And another. And so it goes.

**Author's Note:**

> The song Thor is humming is the oldest known secular song in the Nordic countries, written around 1300. It is written in Old East Norse and is included in Codex Runicus, a transcript of Scanian Law where it forms a final note. This is the English translation:
> 
> I dreamed a dream last night  
> of silk and fair furs,  
> of a pillow so deep and soft,  
> a peace with no disturbance.
> 
> And in the dream I saw  
> as though through a dirty window  
> the whole ill-fated human race,  
> a different fear upon each face.
> 
> The number of their worries grow  
> and with them the number of their solutions —  
> but the answer is often a heavier burden,  
> even when the question hurts to bear.
> 
> As I was able to sleep just as well,  
> I thought that would be best —  
> to rest myself here on fine fur,  
> and forget everyone else.
> 
> Peace, if it is to be found, is where  
> one is furthest from the human noise —  
> and walling oneself around, can have a dream  
> of silk and fine furs.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Loss of Loki](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14452011) by [Roadstergal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadstergal/pseuds/Roadstergal)




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